Virtual Event Summary by: Ayşe Lara SELÇUKER,
Dual BA Student at Columbia University and Sciences Po Paris; written for the LMGlobal.Org

In the second session of the #WWD2022 by Light Millennium, Water presented in a more holistic approach through art, music, performance, short-video clip, poetry, short essay, inspirational talk on water, etc. 
This session celebrated life through the water as one of the four fundamental elements in life (along with air, earth/soil, and light/fire) for all things are exist in the world including plants, all living things-animals, and the human population at large and as the concept of “Water” is at the epicenter from a holistic approach as it is indicated above.
Organized & Presented: The Light Millennium, Charitable Global Human Advancement Organization
Associated with the United Nations Department of Global Communications | #LMGlobalOrg
Sponsoring Mission: Permanent Mission of Costa Rica to the United Nations | #CostaRicaONU
Contributing Organizations are: Water Policy Group (GPG) | African Views (AV) | Global Policy, Diplomacy, Sustainability (GPODS) | Africa Youth Movement (AYM)
Description & Concept Note |  FLIER (pdf) |  BOOKLET with the Bios of the Speakers & Presenters

On March 21st, 2022, The Light Millennium, UNDGC associated NGO and Charitable Global Human Advancement Organization (LMGlobal.Org), celebrated World Water and Poetry days, with the two days combined under the virtual event titled: “Celebration of Water as the Source of Life.”
Given that World Water Day is celebrated on the 22^nd and World Poetry Day is on the 21st of March respectively, it seemed only logical to Founder and President Bircan Ünver who organized the virtual celebration session and moderated the session since she also organized for the #WWD2021, and her poetry programs are well-received over the years as well.

The virtual event was split into two sessions, this focusing on combining poetry and water as a source of life. Beginning with a piano performance by current the Juilliard School student Can Korkmaz Sağlam, who performed “Boat in the Ocean” by Ravel, it was not long before His Excellency, Ambassador, Former Permanent Representative of Bangladesh to the UN, High Representative and Former Senior Representative to the 66^th General Assembly President Mr. Anwarul K. Chowdhury, took the stage to give a “Distinguished Opening Remark” to begin the second session.

Ambassador Chowdhury began by introducing the history of World Water Day. First observed in 1993, the UN-recognized day was established as a result of a landmark earth summit in Rio. He reflected on actively working with colleagues in support of the day, as well as his past experience in the field of water, including various similar UN days such as World Toilet Day, World Environment Day, World Oceans Day, World Wetlands Day, and more.

Ambassador Chowdhury remarked: “Both quantity and quality of water is decreasing as a result of pollution, overconsumption, and poor water management.”

Transitioning from the day’s history, Ambassador Chowdhury alluded to his years of collaboration with Founder and President Ms. Bircan Ünver.

Ambassador Chowdhury organized his speech around an encounter he experienced with his granddaughter just a week before the day of the event.

“While I was reading for today’s speaking last weekend, our 7 year old granddaughter asked me what I was doing. When I told her, she returned with a picture book, and said: ‘This will help you.’”

Ambassador Chowdhury reflected that the children’s book had “masterly but simple descriptions,” leading him to quote the book throughout his speech. Mentioning various facts from the book about water resources around the world, Ambassador Chowdhury ended his reference to the book by saying, “We can learn so much from the new generation.”

An important message from his speech was the systemic and underlying effects of water shortage across the world, such as its effects on sustainable development, economics, and gender equality. He noted, “Increasing demands of an increasing population and rapidly developing global economy and growing effects of climate change will exacerbate the lack of access to water and sanitation.”

He described the many ways in which water is a source of life in 7 points, concluding that valuing water is much more than simply its price, as it forms our households, culture, economics, and education:

1. Water is a source of health.
2. Water is livelihood.
3. Water is time.
4. Water is education
5. Water is transformation.
6. Water is dignity.
7. Water is life.

Further, he explained 5 dimensions of the global water crisis:

1. Disproportionate impact on women and girls: who are oftentimes tasked with collecting water. While both boys and girls begin collecting as children, boys move on at a certain age as girls continue throughout their lives.
2. Focus on Africa: Chowdhury remarked that water is a major factory in African socioeconomic recovery. According to him, Africa is blessed with rainfall and water resources but has severe problems, both manmade and natural, that constrain the exploitation and proper development of its water resource potential.
3. Sustainable Development Goals and Water Security: Ambassador Chowdhury suggested a practical approach to deal with complete interconnected changes, thereby enhancing welfare’s sustainability and development, arguing that water security must lie at the center of any vision set by policymakers.
4. Generational change: Ambassador Chowdhury argued that sustainability requires that services continue to work over time, with the right infrastructure that keeps benefits flowing through generations. Even though some initiatives such as those on water security and World Toilet Day are not as popular or oftentimes under-appreciated, water conservation and consumption are of crucial importance.
5. Inclusion: In this section, Ambassador Chowdhury explained the impacts of water insecurity on discrimination throughout the globe, further expanding the point of discrimination towards women and girls as a result of water insecurity on a socioeconomic level. “The poorest people are often socially excluded and have fewer opportunities for development. Voices go unheard in decisions made on their behalf.”

After Ambassador Choudhury’s speech, the floor was given to Dr. Padmini Murthy, Professor and Global Health Director at New York Medical College. She recited a concisely powerful poem, titled “Women and Water:”

“A woman carrying water

wants better for her daughter

as she works to ensure that the water the girl drinks is pure

and she can go to school and

do things which are cool

living a life free from strife and

leading a full life.”

Following Dr. Murthy was visual artist Marianne A. Kinzer, who had prepared a presentation explaining in detail her experience with art, water, and her paintings on the matter.

Ms. Kinzer slides read. “My interest in water began many years ago when I lived in Berlin, then still a divided city. I was looking for something that would unify the east and west the answer wastewater. You cannot stop water to our man-made bordered. We are all connected through this element that travels around the globe. Water calls for unity.”

She added: “Water has a vital message for us: We cannot survive without clean water; we depend on it. … The water cycle teaches us: whatever we put into the water will be consumed downstream, or rain back onto us.

“Distant genetic memory relates back to the time when we swam as fish in the mighty ocean, long before the first reptile crawled on land and before the first mammal ventured into a prehistoric world. The subconscious mind harbors memories of fluids in which we swam is embryos in our mothers womb, all at one with nature.”

Ms. Kinzer’s presentation on her art was followed by a poem introduction by writer and professor Christopher Sawyer Lauçanno, which is titled: “Life-Giving Rivers“

I am told that each river in India
has its own narrative.
Even the smallest tributary
has its story
legends, myths. 

The smallest stream is holy.
And the Ganges most divine of all.
The very source of life.
An unshakeable force of continual renewal.

Purity and prosperity arise
from the water rising
and the great goddess Ganga
rides Makara—half crocodile, half dolphin
from the Himalayas

all the way to the sea:

                        In         the       mountainous    distance

snow melt
trickles
from

                        crevices

cleaved by moonlight
spurts and spouts
descends
over
boulders
through            rock ledge
bubbles and gurgles
whirls
small                           

            stones

downward
plunges           
into                 
a self-created chasm
grows larger by the kilometer
cascades ferociously
becomes at last
the great life-giving
Ganga.

And you,
life-giving, death-giving
Connecticut,
you too have your stories
and your history
of blood and log jams
of carnage and conceit.

But no one sings anymore,
if ever they did,
of your birth
or your escapades
or your youthful transformations
or middle-aged transgressions
though a few old fisherman have remarked
how in the shallows
the green-gray water bends around
their legs then passes on.

I do know more about paths than about rivers
but don’t really know much about either. 
But I do think the Connecticut is a strong brown god
though it probably isn’t holy.

The path to my own river is just a path:

And then went down to the river
with my little white dog
who poked along the shore edge
nose sniffing out a thousand scents.

She inventoried them all:
dogs     raccoons          field mice        
muskrats          skunks
cats      birds    porcupines      
opossums        squirrels.

I made my own inventory:

The flow barely visible
except near the dam
where geese and cormorants and mergansers gather
bobbing and weaving like drunk prize fighters
in a ring of shimmering
blue water going to green.

And further out near the other shore
Two bass leaping
One boat
seven white swans
four mallards

and a red-tailed hawk circling overhead
eight gulls
no eagle.”

Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno, cited his poem from Mussoorie-Montague Miscellany (Talisman House, 2013) with a mystic voice of tone which has added another layer on the concept and perception of water. For the original format of the poem in pdf format, please click on here>

After Mr. Lauçanno, poet, essayist, and fiction writer Bronwyn Mills provided an excerpt form one of her books that is currently still being written, with the provisional titled “A Canary’s Tale.” A short introduction to the book (from its main character, Cara) and inspired by “Ibn Sina’s Visions” taking place during the exile of the Jews from Spain, reads:

What makes some people yearn to stay by their hearth, to shape the mooring place from which others cast off?  What makes some of us want to leave?  to go thither and yon, to observe lands not yet seen and people not yet encountered?  My people have not had the luxury of a permanent hearth, and though we fervently desire safe harbor, what of those of us who quite naturally cannot stay still?   Can you imagine? From Ibn Sina, we read of the islands, like single travelers wrapped in their cloaks and hunched against the winds; we have been infected with a yearning, a yearning catch up to them and look, not for a miraculous shelter, but what? an elusive miracle of another kind, perhaps.  I wanted to see the Ocean Sea; to find islands such as Ibn Sina describes, to go from island to island, like a child stepping from stone to stone in the shallows of a stream, to see Cipangu, to meet the Great Khan, to arrive from a direction which that exalted ruler would not have expected. All that I wanted to do for myself.   

Before transitioning over to the final speaker, Ms. Bircan Ünver presented her own poem in progress, titled either “I am the Water” or “Treat Me Well.”

“I am the water
I am fish in the sea
In the ocean
I am in the lake
I am in the rivers
I am your oxygen in the air
I am in your cells, veins, and brain since the millennia
I am your core reason being alive and present on this planet
I can live without you,
but you cannot live without me
Your life, you children your grandchildren are dependent on me
but mine only have been risked by you

I am the color green
I am the color blue
I am the reflections of lights over me
I am reflecting of you
I am your mirror
How you’d like to be treated,
treat me well, treat me as yourself

—

I am the light
I am the truth
I am the transparent one
I am the rays of light from the sun
and all around you…

Treat me well,
Treat me mindful
Treat me as you would treat yourself

I am in all your ancient history
I am in steel, I am in gold, I am in diamond
I am in all you value the most
Yet I am treated as you would love to be treated

I am the passages of time
From one century to another
From one millennia to the next
From one person to another
From one generation to another
Your passage of time
only depending on me
and depending on
how well you treat me”

The Light Millennium President’s poem connected the conference to its closing speaker, professor Gary Grossman, who also spoke on the history of progress in water security around the globe. He alluded to Ambassador Chowdhury’s timeline suggesting that it had been exactly thirty years since the UN had decided to celebrate World Water Day on an annual basis, establishing that we are still saying the same things, that water is important, a public good, a human right, and a source of life. He posed the questions, “Are we wrong? Are we ineffective? We talk about them 30 years ago and now,” searching for a reason why we are at the same place.

His first answer was that 30 years was incredibly short considering the rest of human history. Then, he suggested what he called “the most radical idea heard today:” nothing is wrong with the way the world and the UN has approached water security, but instead, we must do more and more World Water day celebrations, continue our efforts whether symbolic or concrete.

Prof. Grossman quoted Harry Truman, who suggested 70 years ago that we had “the knowledge and, by implication, technology to sole any world problem.” Prof. Grossman saw this optimism that he shared 70 years later as crucial to solving any world problem. He said that technology, knowledge, policy, optimism are necessary, but are also not sufficient.

He ended with a line from a rock and roll group he listened to when he was younger:

“Rise up to the new dawn’s early morning
Feel the sunshine warm upon your face
Tomorrow has come a long, long way to help you
Yes it’s your saving grace”

Another piano piece on water pre-performed and recorded by Can Korkmaz Sağlam as well for this particular session as the closing music, titled, “Ondine” by Ravel.

The virtual celebration concluded with a comprehensive acknowledgment of gratitude from Bircan Ünver, leaving invitees and attendees pensive about the influence of water in their lives.

_ . _